Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Gardner Reviews Greve, "The Upside-Down Constitution"

The Upside-Down Constitution (Harvard University Press), by Michael S. Greve, is the subject of an entertaining new review in the Law & Politics Book Review. "Perhaps you, like Keanu Reeves in the film The Matrix, sit at
your desk each day with the vague impression that something about the
world is deeply wrong," begins reviewer James A. Gardner (SUNY Buffalo), "but you cannot quite put your finger on the
problem."

Gardner continues:

Michael Greve, the John Searle Scholar at the American
Enterprise Institute, would like to be your Morpheus. In this sprawling,
idiosyncratic, and often frustrating book, Greve reveals The Truth: the
problem, at least in the United States, is federalism, which has not
merely run off the rails, but has become literally inverted, promoting
what it was designed to prevent, and preventing what it was designed to
promote. In a book that aspires to be simultaneously a work of political
economy, constitutional history, and doctrinal critique, and that along
the way also attempts a biting, corrective intervention into
contemporary conservative constitutional theory, Greve explains how true
federalism’s demise, and its replacement with an imposter, has caused
such misery.

Greve’s basic claim is that, over the course of the twentieth century,
the Constitution was “revolutionized.” By this he means much more than
the conventional, and undeniable, proposition that the meaning of
important provisions of the Constitution, such as the Commerce Clause,
changed over time. Instead, he means something much bolder and more
specific: the most significant structural provisions of the
Constitution, he argues, “have come to assume the opposite of their
reasonable meaning” (p.2).